


A Single Glimpse of Terrible Light in the Darkness

by ThisCat



Series: Denkatt (GG self-insert fic) [3]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Despair, Gen, Hopeless situations, Obsession, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 12:02:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21197342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCat/pseuds/ThisCat
Summary: Alice meets Denkatt.After centuries of silence, Denkatt can talk, and it tears her to pieces, again and again and again.





	1. First Meeting

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Gift of the Dreen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16448273) by [phoenixyfriend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixyfriend/pseuds/phoenixyfriend). 

> A lot of this is taken directly from The Gift of the Dreen chapter 27.  
This is just the situation from Denkatt's PoV. I take credit for wording, aside from Alice's dialogue and some of Denkatt's, and the rest is all Phoenixy's.

_You’re one of the nicer delusions, honestly._

_Are you going to stick around?_

Denkatt isn’t even sure she’s actually talking to anyone, but the feeling of being listened to doesn’t go away. It’s new. It’s probably not real, but it’s _new_ and it’s _hope_ and she takes hold of it for all it’s worth.

There’s still no response (of course there’s no response it’s not _real_ she’s just imagining things again) but the feeling is still there, and she needs… she needs something, needs more than hope alone.

_Please_, she begs into the waiting void. _Please be real. I haven’t talked to anyone for real since I was real myself and I think I’m falling apart, please. _

_Please say something. Please actually hear me, please, I’m here. People only ever hear me when someone cracks apart space and time and then it’s only for a moment and they’ve never gotten it, never got the pattern, so they never tried again, and…._

_Please be real. Please don’t be my imagination, I can’t take that again. Please tell me you’re actually someone, I’m actually talking to someone, it’s been so, so long and so long and it’ll be so long still and I know it won’t end but please, please…_.

“I’M HERE!”

A voice. A real voice, in real sound. With real words. Current Romanian, which isn’t ideal, but it’s perfect. Perfect.

“I’m here, I’m real, I can _hear you_.”

Someone. A girl. Young woman. Human. Alive. She climbs up the stairs and runs close and it’s her voice and she’s here. She’s here.

Denkatt’s heart falls apart to endless, despair-tinged joy.

If she could cry, she would. The buzz of emotion eats her from the inside, claws at her mind, and it’s too much, too good to be true.

“I’m here,” the girl says. “Can… can you hear me?”

_YES_, Denkatt shouts, pouring all her emotions into this one word. Every buzz, every clinging claw of feeling, shouted into the world.

Shouted for real. For _real_.

(Please let this be real.)

“My name is Alice,” the girl says. _Alice_ says. Alice, Alice, Alice. “Do you – English, do you know English?”

English? It’s been… so long, so long since she heard her second language. Ages and ages and ages.

_I… I used to. I might, I… it’s been forever, but I’ll try, I’ll try. I, god, I only kept up with Romanian because they speak from the hill. Prayer and oaths and it’s not conversation but it’s something and I… I don’t… know. English is… old, to me, I don’t… I…_

English is a dream. A pleasant memory. A fantasy of things long forgotten and gone.

_Please be real. I can’t… can’t believe you’re… Convince me you’re real. Please. Talk to me._

“I’m Alice,” Alice says again. “I’m the latest Gift.”

Shock. Rage.

She’s a Gift. Alice is a _Gift_. Stolen, broken, tormented, just like Denkatt was.

“I know,” Alice says hurriedly, and Denkatt realizes she’s started screaming again. “I know you hate them, I do too. I _get_ it.”

And she does. Of course she does.

She’s so _young_. Denkatt knows she wasn’t much older herself, back when she fell through, but Alice looks so young. Barely an adult.

No one should have to deal with being yanked through time and dimensions but these _creeps_ don’t _care…_.

Alice reaches up and tries to brush the bangs out of Denkatt’s eyes. It’s pointless, of course, but the _touch…_. She feels nothing. No pressure, no temperature, only the phantom whisper of knowing it’s there.

Desperate longing bursts forth like a flood, sweeping up the pieces of her already shattered heart, and she imagines swallowing it down so as to not drown Alice in it.

Instead, she laughs, or sobs, or something that would have been a sound had she a throat. _Won’t work. It was never long enough_.

Alice isn't the first one to try, but there haven’t been many. It matters. It matters.

_But thank you for trying_, she finishes the sentence.

Alice steps back and walks around her.

Denkatt can’t see her face now, can only follow the steps from the corners of her unmoving eyes.

“How long has it been? You’ve been down here for… eight hundred years? I think?”

_I don’t know. How would I know?_ Denkatt says. _I can’t count days or years or anything down here. I don’t get tired and nothing ever changes._

Mostly, at least. Nothing changes but the accumulation of the dead.

Well, a few other things, besides. _Sometimes… Sometimes they come by and give me updates, like… like the births and deaths and marriages of the Heterodynes. And sometimes people get married here. They tell me what year it is, then._

She doesn’t need to pause to breathe. Sometimes she needs to pause to gather herself.

_The Jägers, too. They… They tell me how many died, when they give me the hats. Every hat here has a story. A person. The day they were born and the day they drank the bräu. And the day they died, if it’s different. If they got to be a jäger for a while, but that’s a… a minority._

_It’s been a while, though, since anyone was here. To tell me things, at least._

“It’s 1890,” Alice says. “June, but I forget the date. It’s pretty hot outside, and some of the buildings are crumbling a little. There hasn’t been a Heterodyne in… sixteen years or something like that. I know what the situation is, but I can’t tell you while the Jägers and Van are here….”

The Jägers? Oh. Denkatt hasn’t even noticed the other people standing around. Even her Jägers. Even little Gkika, who hasn’t been little in ages and ages.

“I maybe can’t tell you at all, but if I do, it’s not like you can do anything with the information, so… they probably won’t care.”

They better not. If they deny her any more now, she’ll… shatter, again, probably.

Alice moves, puts her hand on Denkatt’s outstretched one, and again that swell of longing appears. Again she beats her heart against the solid wall of her own existence.

“Can you feel that?” Alice asks.

_No_, Denkatt replies. _But thank you for trying._

It’s too much. Far too much at once, and she wants to curl up in the corner and sleep, but she can’t. She wants to hide, wants to disappear, wants an inch of space from this burning presence, but she’s scared Alice will go and not come back if she pushes her away even a little.

She doesn’t want Alice to leave. Wants her to stay here, touching, talking, for ever and ever and ever.

Denkatt wants to disappear into hiding from her own mind. She wants a story, actually.

_Tell me… Tell me about yourself,_ she says, trying not to beg. _Tell me everything. I haven’t had conversation, haven’t had anything, a friend, in… so long. _

Everything is aching. It’s all too real and too unreal all at once and she aches for it.

_You’re the first real thing to happen to me in centuries and I can’t. I can’t take it._

“They broke you,” Alice whispers, as if that’s new. “They could have let you go after a few decades.”

She knows.

“You wouldn’t have been able to change anything after that, not really.”

She _knows_.

“They could have… this was just _cruel_.”

Yes, she knows, she knows. Doesn’t Alice know she _knows_?

She doesn’t want this now. She can’t take this right now.

_It was_, she says. _I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I told you my story, tell me yours. Something else. Tell me something different._

“I’m part of a circus,” Alice says. “I’m a dancer, and I’ve been learning aerial silks. I’m sort of dating a jägerwoman. I don’t know if you’d remember her, though she said she’s visited a few times.”

She probably would. There aren’t that many female jägers still, and fewer yet who visit for no reason. Clearly not little Gkika. Maria maybe? No matter. She’ll find out eventally.

“I was a barista, in my life before, and I had a bachelor’s degree in business admin. I’m… uh… the canon I read before coming here was a webcomic. You said yours was a game?”

She’s read webcomics before, she thinks. It’s been a long, long time, but she remembers there having been ones she liked.

_Somewhat like Civ, they said, yes,_ she says. _It was… I loved it, at the time. It was a great game. Not as great a reality. Should’ve stayed a game._

“I get that,” Alice says, quietly, because of course she understands. “I feel the same way. But hey, at least I stopped injuring myself whenever I make drinks? That’s good.”

...Okay, damage resistance yes, but?

_You...what? Why did you injure yourself whenever you made drinks before?_

“I’m clumsy and Starbucks was really fast-paced,” Alice says. “There were… a lot of burns, though a lot of that was the ovens, not the actual drink-making….”

Denkatt thinks she laughs, for just a moment. It’s hard to tell without the physical reaction.

_I can’t say the phasing wasn’t useful,_ she says.

A memory surfaces of five years in, not being bothered to take the stairs down and just jumping and tumbling instead. Faster. Much more fun.

She’s not sure how she feels about remembering.

_But it wasn’t worth, you know…._

“Everything else?” Alice asks. She laughs, but it sounds like she’s crying. “Yeah, I feel that.”

That’s a phrase she hasn’t heard in so long. She feels that. Yes, she does. She does.

And it’s good. She’s calming down and she doesn’t feel but she feels warm, past the occasional sting of pain, and it’s good.

Alice sits down and wraps her arms around her knees like she’s staying, like she’s planning to sit there for a while.

“How much do you remember, of before? Like, do you remember other fandoms? Marvel or Harry Potter or something?”

She remembers more now than she did ten minutes ago, modern English dragging her memories kicking and screaming back into the light. Marvel is or was superheroes, and there were movies and comics and… was that Superman? Or was that something similar? Harry Potter was the wizard story from her entire childhood, she’s sure.

The names alone shoot through her like beacons, lighting a way to dusty old memories she’d forgotten she filed away.

_Kind of,_ she says. _I think they messed with my memory to make sure I’d remember the game, so I could use it, but they didn’t care much about anything else. My memory’s… patchy, and I’ve… It's so easy to disappear into my own imagination. It’s better than anything else out here, so I’ve written so much fanfiction in my head about things I used to read that I don’t remember what’s canon and what isn’t._

“Sounds familiar,” Alice laughs. “Um… gosh, I want to keep talking but I’m totally blanking on what to talk about.”

Anything, anything, Denkatt thinks, but doesn’t quite say-think. (Tell me your stories, let me tell you mine, let’s sit here and talk about better ways for old movies to end until we run out of movies and books and comics and then start over.)

She doesn’t want Alice to go.

_Do you have any friends?_ she asks. The best way to keep people invested is to ask them about themselves. And she’s interested. She really is. _Tell me about them._

“Okay,” Alice says. “I can do that.”

And she does. And she doesn’t leave. Not of her own volition.

They talk and they talk, and every word is a treasure. Every story feels a little more real.

Denkatt bites down her panic attacks, her moments of disbelief. Her mind convinces her again and again that this is all another delusion, that she’s talking to no one, that even if it’s real, it won’t _last_.

She bites it all down, and she talks to Alice. Because she _can_. She can. She can. She can.

She’s not alone.

She will be, again, but for this mere instant, this one moment, she’s not alone, and her insides are magma.

They talk until, eventually, Alice falls asleep and is quiet.

And the spell lifts.

Gkika makes sure she gets home safe, because Gkika has always been good at that. At taking care of people.

And then, again, Denkatt is alone.

And she waits.


	2. Last Meeting

“So, um, the circus is leaving town tonight,” Alice says, and everything breaks.

Every day for several days now they’ve talked, and it’s been a dream and a treasure, water in the desert, light in the darkness, a moment of magic and wonder and _love_, she’s so in love, every fibre of her being twisted around these few hours every day.

And.

She knew it couldn’t last? Nothing lasts. She’s wished wished wished but she knows it’s all futile because everything is.

In the long hours between visits the hope and wait for Alice to come back is the only thing keeping her aloft, keeping her together as she breaks and breaks again, and she knows then, has thought it through so many times, that this won’t last, that it’s a moment’s respite in an ocean, she knows, but….

She thought she had more _time_.

All of that washes away the instant Alice comes back, brings that magic back, spreads light with every step of her feet, and she can forget for just a moment that she’s doomed forever.

And now Alice is leaving.

Alice is abandoning her to nothing and nothing and nothing and she _breaks_.

Alice was supposed to _stay_.

She cracks, and darkness spills out from below, washing away hope and light and reason, and it overflows, bursting out in a terrible cry, _**YOU’RE NOT STAYING!?!**_

Of course she’s not staying but Denkatt _needs_ her to stay. Needs it more fiercely than she’s ever needed anything, and Alice steps back when she shouts and panic, panic overtakes her because NO! She can’t go! Come back, come back please, and touch and talk and don’t leave and please!

“I _can’t_,” Alice says and her words are stuttered and hard to understand under the ocean of fear and rage and despair, but she can’t, she says. She has things to do, apparently.

_**DON’T**_, that’s what the Jägers are for, _please_, and Denkatt doesn’t know what she’s saying except she’s terrified, all the way through bone she doesn’t have, and she’s grasping at straws that were never real. Please, please, please.

And Alice argues and she sounds scared too and this is _terrifying_ but Alice can’t be scared she needs to be happy, she needs to be _here_ more than anything.

_ **DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE AGAIN!** _

And Alice falls to her knees, existence stuttering, and if she never got up at least she’d _stay_ and that’s another terrible wound on her soul in the torrent of darkness and panic and pain and no, no no no no please.

“They’ll _statue_ me!” Alice cries, like she _knows_. Like she has _any idea_.

_**THEN AT LEAST I WOULDN’T BE ALONE**_, the terrified creature that is Denkatt shouts.

And no, _no, NO!_

No, she didn’t, but NO, PLEASE!

And Alice isn’t answering anymore.

Denkatt screams in terror and panic and horrified pain, because _no_, this was what wasn’t meant to happen, but Alice is stepping back, is walking away, is _leaving, leaving, going away_, because she _can_, and nothing Denkatt does can change that.

But she tries, she screams and screams and screams because her mind is terror and the harder she grasps the faster Alice slips away but she can’t stop, can’t think, can’t talk anymore, and she begs and pleads with words that aren’t hers, aren’t anyone’s, just the only words she can find, she begs and cries and calls and screams.

Please, please, please.

But nothing answers.

Nothing ever does.

She is alone.

And time stops making sense again.

That sense of someone listening disappears, and her begging falls voicelessly into the void.

And slowly.

Slowly, the panic drains away.

Leaves her weightless and untethered in a void filled with the shards of her self and her soul, all mixed up with the darkness she can’t shake, because that’s her too.

She’s not tired.

She never is, but she’s broken again and she doesn’t want to pick up the pieces yet.

She doesn’t want to _think_.

But she has to.

She has to.

She knows what she said. She knows what she did.

She’s a broken, inhuman monster, and not in a good way. She’s broken the only thing she’s been allowed to touch and she wants it _back_, wants it _BACK_, wants, but, no, no, no, no.

Her only ever friend left, and it was all her own fault.

She _knows_ what she said. Better than Alice does, even. Probably.

She knows.

She knows.

She knows.

And she can’t cry anymore but she does anyway. Still shattered, she bleeds regret, and she begs, and she begs and she begs.

A taste of relief in an ocean of pain, and she broke it herself. And now she’ll long for it for the rest of her eternity.

It’s almost what she deserves this time around, to lose it.

She wants it back, she wants it back, she wants it back.

She knows what she said.

And she knows she meant it.

And that’s worse.

Somehow.

“Hm,” a voice says, and Denkatt draws herself together in a desperate moment of wild belief that maybe Alice came back? So she can apologize. So she can try harder, this time, to pretend to be human.

But of course it’s not Alice.

It’s the old man. Carson. The Seneschal, or the last one, at least.

He’s breathing hard from the climb, resting for a moment now that he’s on the top, and she can just barely see him from the corner of her eye.

It’s an old job, his. It’s called something different, but she thinks it’s come from what she used to be, once.

Once, she might have cared about that.

He has a bunch of paper under his arm, and he walks up and sits down on the chair left in front of her from Alice’s visits, and he unfurls the paper and it’s a newspaper, she remembers. She hasn’t seen one of those since she was twenty and real.

“Alice mentioned you’d probably appreciate updates,” he says, like it isn’t a blessing she doesn’t deserve.

And she cries regret and gratitude into the void as he reads.


End file.
